


The Birth of a Star

by ohjustdisarmalready



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pidge | Katie Holt is Savage, We got Matt back hooray!, but like no one cries so I'm good right, jk no one is happy, more tags than fic, not in a roasting way but like as an opponent, ok i will stop now, turned out angstier than i meant it to, well i guess in a roasting way depending on your interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8154203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohjustdisarmalready/pseuds/ohjustdisarmalready
Summary: I wanted gratuitous fluff and siblingly love for the Holts wherein Matt is rescued and Pidge gets to be the dashing white knight. This came out. Maybe next time?





	

**Author's Note:**

> PRONOUNS! Why choose one when you can change which pronouns you use depending on POV? Since no one has referred to Pidge in third person in the show, I used 'they' for the rest of the paladins and 'she' for Matt, since he left a sister at home and Pidge probably didn't spend a lot of time talking to him about pronouns before the fic.

The Galra ship shuddered as the green lion escaped. The paladins felt a collective relief and Lance cheered as Pidge’s mind rejoined theirs in Voltron. Darker, perhaps, more troubled, but they could work on that. They had their youngest back, and anything more was conquerable.

“Paladins, good job! Now destroy it!” Allura commanded. They didn’t have time to celebrate just yet. Pidge’s mind tried to wander and Shiro corralled it back.

“Welcome back. Let’s take these guys out!” His vengeance came to the fore, resonating and growing. These Galra in particular would get what was coming to them.

A foreign comm patched through to Voltron. Pidge’s face, sans glasses, appeared onscreen.

“Matt, just like we practiced. You ready?”

Reflexively, Voltron’s viewscreen came up. The person piloting the green lion was wearing Pidge’s glasses.

“Matt? How are—“ Shiro began.

“We haven’t got a lot of time, guys,” Pidge interrupted, glancing around at a room that was not the green lion’s cockpit.

“That doesn’t look like the rest of the lion robot,” ‘Matt’s’ mind tried to wander again before they all dragged it back to Voltron. This was almost worse than when they were first learning, Hunk suggested. At least then they’d all been beginners together.

Keith didn’t care about this guy’s team dynamic with them—wasn’t like they’d have to form Voltron with him again. They just had to get away and smash the Galra ship. Keith was good at that.

“Focus, not-Pidge. You’re making me pull all the weight,” he grumbled as he struggled to keep the arms right. Heh, right. Shut up, Lance.

Matt’s mind shuddered back into position. “Right. Katie, did you get everything we needed ready?”

Pidge held up a knot of wires and showed their wrist’s holoscreen. Their brother supplied it was supposed to be destructive.

“Ripped everything out that looked important,” Pidge grinned. Hunk made a pained sound. “Coded up a self-destruct, too. It’s, uh, remote. So I can activate it from…here. Just get out of the danger zone and stay there; I don’t know exactly how this is gonna work. It might take a second for the whole thing to go.”

Matt provided imagery of a little girl wreaking bloody vengeance on schoolyard bullies, smokebombs in lockers, and Shiro sent back a young warrior just waiting to be underestimated. _Haxus is dead, and you’re next!_

Lance was preoccupied with a tiny cadet saying he didn’t have time for friends and yelling at his commanding officers. Keith, always following closer than he’d admit, thought of the paladin willing to let the universe burn to find their family. They agreed.

“Sure thing, Pidge. Let’s all get out of here and you can blow it all up,” he challenged. Pidge was standing in a darkened purple room. There was a banging sound in the background and the dull flash of what might be faraway red lights. Pidge winced and looked behind them.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Get over here,” Lance scowled. He was sick of his teammates trying to get themselves killed.

Matt’s mind tried to spiral off again and Shirp pulled it back. They’d help no one by separating at this point—the Galra ship was suspiciously inactive, but that could change at any moment.

Something broke behind Pidge. They swore and started hitting buttons.

“Okay, yeah, so Matt, I lied, I’m still on the ship. It’s okay, I have a plan, it’s—“ There was a crash and Pidge whipped around to face two Galra soldiers. Keith’s rage was a good counter for Matt’s fear.

“Too late, fuckers,” Pidge snarled, curling over their wrist tablet.

“No,” Matt whispered. Or he was thinking. Or they were all thinking. Pidge’s shoulders tightened.

“You have no weapons, Paladin. Come back to your assigned location.” Matt was conscious of the bayard Katie had given to him— _it’s yours, I just held on to it for you for a little while!_

Hunk pushed to move forward, but Matt rejected the idea. His little sister could be so stubborn, she’d take her friends down to beat her enemies. He could remember her tearing her own arguments apart to beat her opponents before. She had a plan. She had to have a plan.

“Get ready to provide backup,” Shiro murmured as the Galra onscreen spit threats. “Whatever they’re doing, we need to be out of the blast radius and ready for anything.”

Hunk wanted to be there. They all wanted to be there. Pidge was smaller than the Galra. Pidge was more vicious.

“I know what you did to my dad,” Pidge told the Galra. “There is nothing you have over me. There is _nothing_ more you can do to me. Except for one thing.”

The Galra guns began to glow as they prepared to fire. Voltron prepared to swoop in, consequences be damned. Someone was breathing too loudly over the comm.

Pidge gave the Galra a bloodthirsty grin past the monitor. “You can do me a favor and _shut your quiznak.”_

Pidge hit a button and the comm went dark. The Galra ship went dark.  It seemed for a second as if the universe went dark as the Galra ship shuddered and hummed. And then, like rust flaking off, a piece drifted from the ship. Another. More, until the edges of the ship were rotted away and only the framework left. Voltron moved to get a better view, to find their teammate, but the view on the screen didn’t change. There were no bodies visible. Matt had never been so impatient in his life. Life support had been turned off, and artificial gravity must have been, what…reversed? He struggled through half-forgotten calculations—what, polarization? No, they hadn’t had the materials. Where were they getting their energy from?

The Galra ship glowed a gentle red and Matt was pretty sure he knew.

“She ionized the fuel source. She’s making a star,” he gasped. The paladins didn’t understand, but Katie had always…

They had to get out. He didn’t know how far science had gone while he’d been with the Galra, but this wasn’t stable. It was as likely as not to turn into a black hole. Hell, maybe it was supposed to turn into a black hole. But his little sister was in there. There had been other prisoners. Matt stared at the alien console in front of him, conflicted. The glow was rising through the spectrum—it looked green now, and it would be white soon. Katie. Katie was making a star. Katie was burning hundreds of people alive.

Kalrek had been the name of another prisoner on the ship. He was sort of grey and small and had liked the color purple before getting kidnapped.

The viewscreen stopped recording images. Funny how he didn’t feel any damage to the Voltron robot when the cameras had been compromised.

His little sister. She had to know there were other prisoners. She’d been in with the other prisoners. He’d introduced her to Kalrek. She had told him her crew would come and to be ready.

“—att. Matt. Matt! Matt, you need to focus or we’re going to fall apart! Matt!” Shiro’s voice sounded distant and wrong, like a bad recording. His little sister was in there. She had a plan, right?

“Hey, dumbass! Freak out later! When is Pidge gonna get out of there?” The Asian guy was talking, too. Well, the Asian guy that wasn’t Shiro. He should have asked Katie for their names. He’d known them a second ago. He’d known who Pidge was a second ago.

Right. Katie. Space lions. They just needed. They just needed to get out of the blast radius before it became an event horizon.

“We’ve gotta get out of here. The plan was…go back to the place you guys live. She’s gonna send a message to the robot lion if we get separated. It’s gonna download, but we’ve gotta get back to the place. There’s, there’s, a connection. At the place. And she’ll send a message saying where to pick her up. And we’d better not be late.” Was his voice too fast? Wasn’t everything going too fast? He was so tired. He focused on the giant lion robot. Had to think like the other lion robot people. Katie had told him about that.

The ship was no longer distinguishable past the glow. Then there wasn’t a glow and they were somewhere else. Katie appeared on the viewscreen. She was in the same room, unharmed.

“Matt, just like we practiced. You ready?” She looked into the screen like she was checking on him.

Oh. That’s where the other paladins had gone. He could feel them again.

The rest of their viewscreen was back to the Galra ship. It was whole and unharmed, mysteriously still and silent. No attack while they hovered before it.

“Paladins,” Allura’s voice came through the comm, staticky, “Coran has found—a bug, in your systems. Overriding your viewscreens.”

Keith cringed. Hunk hunched inward as if he could become smaller, hide in himself and in his lion. Voltron separated into five forms.

“What’s the glitch, then? It’s just giving us a big déjà vu moment?” Lance asked. We don’t have a lot of time, guys, Pidge said in the background, and fizzled out.

Coran came on the comm system. “Looks like something Pidge was working on with me before this whole bit! No worry, it’s gone now. I can’t imagine how it was accidentally uploaded like that! Pidge, good job pulling that together under captivity! Shame you cut off our communications while you were at it, eh? We couldn’t see a thing!”

Shiro shuddered and sat up straighter. “Let’s focus on landing. Matt, just follow me. We’ll…regroup once we’re all in one place.”

All in one place. Hah. Bad word choice. There wasn’t really a good word choice here.

“Guys? What’s with the long faces? That whole thing was just a trick! Man, I am going to get Pidge for winding us up like that, right? Like—“ Lance stopped.

“Like they really blew up a Galra ship with them inside it? Yeah. That’s a lot like what the recording was like.” Keith was the only one willing to say it to him.

Lance was stubborn. “Yeah. Pidge is really good at that hologram stuff, right? I’ll have to ask them how they did it once they meet back up with us!” He chuckled. It was a little thin.

“Lance.” Hunk was the one to speak up this time. The three of them had been a team first. It felt right. Pidge had done what they’d done for their brother, but their teammates would be the first to say so.

“It’s not like…it isn’t like they just gave us an old recording of what they did, right? That was all a computer program. Like Pidge is good at. Not real, though. Pidge is good at making things seem real.” His voice broke. Matt clutched at the controls of his sister’s ship with his sister’s bayard in his sister’s clothes. She had worn his glasses and taken his courses at the Garrison and hated his teachers.

Katie had never been able to lie to him for long, though.

“Matt was on the ship right before we saw that, right? So it couldn’t have been fake. Because the ship was right there.” Lance kept talking. Matt wanted to shut him up.

“Matt?” Shiro’s voice rose a little. Hope. Matt hated this.

“She told me to sleep in the lion. So I’d be ready when I had to go. And I don’t know…It felt like I was moving for a second, but she said it did that sometimes, because the lion…it can feel you. And I looked at the viewscreen and it didn’t look like I’d moved, so…” God, it could have been a whole day ago. He probably hadn’t even been in the same part of the galaxy as the ship he’d left her on when he’d woken up. “She had this robot watching the ship. She said it was so she could watch. She named it. She said it was okay, it would blow up once she took care of the ship…”

God. God.

Matt looked at the little blade his sister had given him. She’d been surprised when it hadn’t changed shape when she’d given it to him, like it didn’t even register him as a different person. Like some other Holt could just fly her crazy space lion and conquer aliens with her team. She’d smiled like she’d done something cleverer than him. She’d told him it liked him.

God.

He was going to throw up. He was going to cry.

He was going to kill those Galra bastards.

He was going to kill every one of those fuckers that had taken his family away from him.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I really tried for fluff...I might have to continue this and have Pidge be okay. Thoughts? I'm usually a one fic per fandom kind of guy, but I don't know. I might get inspired/bored. Also, I wanted to end it with a symmetry between Pidge's motives at the beginning of the show and Matt's at the end of the fic. Did that come across? It's been a while since I've written...


End file.
